It’s that time of year, folks. The time of year when the most formulaic movies take over screens everywhere: the Christmas movie. Now, I’m not saying that “Hallmark” movies are inherently bad. My roommate loves them, and in small amounts, they aren’t any worse than any other bland rom-coms. There are also some legitimately and surprisingly good seasonal movies. Last year’s Red One was a delightful romp, and The Naughty Nine from the year before was a really fun family heist movie. There are holiday horror films (again, usually pretty average) with Krampus slowly becoming king. Then there are the controversies, like whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie or not. Of course, we can’t leave the 18 versions of A Christmas Carol off this list.
My point here is that the Christmas movie is more than a singular film genre. Anything can, and probably has been, made into a Christmas movie. Which brings us to Roll Camera, the incredible cooperative game of filmmaking, and its X-Mas Movie Story Pack.
As I mentioned in our review of Roll Camera (which you are welcome to read for more info on the game) I don’t actually have a copy of the base game. My friends, and hosts of The Read-Along Podcast, Scott and Anita, generously lent me their copy to play with. But that also means I don’t have any of the other story packs from Kean Bean Studio to compare this to. That’s a bit unfortunate, because it feels like calling this just a “Stary Pack” seems like a disservice to it. There are several new things that let you Christmas up your game as much or as little as you want.
If you want, you can just shuffle in the 10 Scene Cards into the deck and use the top and/or bottom half Script Cards for your title. OR you could go for a whole new way to add Holiday Cheer to the game. Place the Crew Cheer track next to the main board and place a marker on it. Every turn, after a Problem is drawn, move the marker down on the Cheer Track for every Problem card in the Problem Queue. To raise the Cheer marker, you need to give Gift cards to other players. When cheer is high, Scenes gain quality when shot. When Cheer is low, the VFX face of the Crew Dice is no longer wild, and when Cheer is really low, Scenes also cost $1 more to shoot.
Another challenge added is three Ghosts you may have heard of. These are shuffled into the Problem deck (near the top if you’re feeling particularly Scroogey) and have haunting consequences when drawn. They are not Problems to be resolved themselves, but rather change how the other Problems are played. The Ghost of Productions Past, the top resolved Problem, back into play. The Ghost of Productions Present has you draw another Problem, but you can’t resolve any Problems that enter play that turn. Finally, the Ghost of Productions Future lets you ignore all Problem effects this turn, but at the cost of drawing two new Problems instead of only one.
At first glance, the Scene cards are just scene cards, with Holiday themed pictures on them. But it was playing these scene cards specifically that I realized just how geniusly the Scene cards are designed. As a reminder, to shoot a Scene you need to create a tableau on the set, using crew dice. So there I am playing the game, when I come across a card with a snowball fight picture on it. Then I look at the required tableau. Two Actors with a normally wild VFX face in between them. The VFX logo is white and looks like a snowball exploding… The dice actually match the scene, and I somehow never realized that! There’s a scene with a guy all tangled up in Christmas Lights that requires an Actor surrounded by Lighting faces. BRILLIANT.
I love what’s in this Story Pack, don’t get me wrong here, but I was disappointed that there weren’t more seasonal Scenes, Problems, Ideas, etc. I always love being able to set up a game with only the Christmas components and have some replayability. You can’t really do that here, and I don’t love the addition of the Cheer Track enough to really make up for that. But again, I do like the Cheer Track idea and love everything included in this pack. If you have Roll Camera, this is a great excuse to pull it out for a holiday game night!
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